Monthly Archives: September 2014

Geographies: New England Book Work, the New England Chapter of The Guild of Book Workers exhibition, is now on view at The University of Vermont’s Bailey/Howe Library in Burlington, Vermont through December 12, 2014.

Join us for a guided tour of the exhibit on Wednesday, October 8, 2014, 6:30-7:30 pm. Meet in Special Collections, Bailey/Howe Library at UVM. Exhibitors Deborah Howe and Stephanie Wolff will lead a guided tour of the exhibit. They will discuss the creation of their own books in the show, methods of construction used by other exhibitors, and contemporary bookbinding and book arts. Deborah Howe is the Collections Conservator and a Book Arts Instructor at Dartmouth College Library, and board member of the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland, Ohio. Stephanie Wolff is an artist, hand bookbinder, and book conservator. She teaches book arts to students of all ages, including at Dartmouth College Library’s Book Arts Workshop. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, email uvmsc@uvm.edu or call (802) 656-2138.

Geographies: New England Book Work includes bookbindings and artist’s books that relate to the theme of New England created by 26 of our members. Included are classic regional texts, books that make personal connections to the region, and New England history from a variety of perspectives, among other topics. It is open to the public and located in the display cases on the main floor of UVM’s Bailey/Howe Library in Burlington, VT. The show will remain on view through December 12, 2014. For library hours see http://library.uvm.edu/hours/

Subsequent tour stops include Williams College in Massachusetts; Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and the show ends its run in October of 2015 at Connecticut’s Creative Arts Workshop.

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Take an online workshop with London-based binder Benjamin Elbel to learn his innovative Onion Skin binding structure. Learn the complex sequence of scores, folds and gluings involved in the amazing Onion Skin binding, a structure that grows from the inside to the outside, gradually incorporating the single sheets into a continuous stub. See examples of Benjamin’s work on his website.

The workshop will be hosted at North Bennet Street School in collaboration with the New England Chapter of the Guild of Book Workers in a traditional workshop setting. However, Benjamin’s instruction will be projected on a screen for students as he will be located at his studio in London.

Michael Kuch–author, artist, printer, and publisher–attended Hampshire College in Amherst MA and was mentored by noted graphic artist, sculptor, and typographer Leonard Baskin. Kuch founded his own Double Elephant Press in the Pioneer Valley in 1994. He has collaborated with a number of area printers and binders.

The Mortimer Rare Book Room sponsors an annual McGrath Lecture in contemporary book arts, named for Harold P. McGrath (1922-2000), master printer. McGrath was a vital and beloved part of the local book arts community, printing for Leonard Baskin (Gehenna Press), Barry Moser (Pennyroyal Press), and Alan Robinson (Press of the Sea Turtle). McGrath mentored and befriended dozens of aspiring printers, artists, bookbinders, and other practitioners of the book arts.

To accompany this lecture, there is an exhibition of selected works from the Double Elephant Press, on view through December 15 at the entrance to the Mortimer Rare Book Room (Neilson Library, level 3). For more information: Barbara Blumenthal, Mortimer Rare Book Room (mrbr@smith.edu; 413.585.2906) or http://www.smith.edu/libraries/info/news/2014mcgrath-lecture

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Looking for a small group of folks in the Mid Coast Maine area who would be interested in the use, care and maintenance of a Letterpress (Vandercook SP 15). Currently hoping to place in the print studio at Waterfall Arts, Belfast. All the details and arrangements to be worked out. The letterpress can be used to make all sorts of prints, linocuts, collographs, etc. in multiple editions. Also looking for anyone who might be interested in classes learning to use and run a letterpress.

InsideOUT celebrates the art and craft of contemporary bookbinding and private press printing. Organized by Designer Bookbinders, this ambitious project is a collaboration between thirty-four binders based in the United Kingdom and twenty-five based in North America.

Artist and writer Robert Seydel (1960-2011) left behind a multi-layered, highly original body of work marked by an unrelenting sense of play. His extraordinary and eclectic production incorporated collage, drawing, photography, and narrative and lyric writing, often using various personas and fictional constructs to explore the boundaries between the salvaged and the lost, the unknown and the unknowable, the art that is made and the art that is found. In Book of Ruth, which is featured in this exhibition, Seydel’s primary alter ego is Ruth Greisman – banker by day, artist by night, friend of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell – who lived in Queens and cared for her WWI shell-shocked brother.

“Robert Seydel:The Eye in Matter,” a major retrospective exhibition at Smith College, features a definitive selection from Seydel’s acclaimed “Ruth” series — more than 300 collages, “journal pages,” and drawings — which purportedly were discovered buried in boxes of miscellanea in the Joseph Cornell Study Center at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and in the family garage. The exhibition, curated by Peter Gizzi, Richard Kraft, and Lisa Pearson, and sponsored by the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, will include many previously unpublished and unexhibited works, as well as Seydel’s notebooks, open to reveal the process of making this visionary body of work.

In conjunction with the exhibition, on September 29, at 6 pm in the Neilson Library Browsing Room at Smith College, there will be a roundtable discussion about Seydel’s unusual combination of writing and visual art . A reception in the Book Arts Gallery following the presentation will afford visitors a close look at the exhibition.

“Robert Seydel: The Eye in Matter” coincides with the publication of A Picture is Always a Book: Further Writings from the Book of Ruth, edited by Lisa Pearson of Siglio Press, with an interview by Savina Velkova. The book is co-published with the Mortimer Rare Book Room, and copies will be available during the exhibition. A Picture Is Always a Book is a first person, fictional archive, collecting over seventy of Ruth’s “journal pages,” luminescent writings infused with play and pathos, typed up on paper purloined from old photo albums, adorned with drawings in colored pencils, oil pens, white-out, and ink stamps.

Seydell trained as a photographer (MFA, Rhode Island School of Design, 1990) but also had an academic background in literature (BFA, New York University in Photography and English, 1984). Seydel began his pursuit of a hybrid species of art and literature soon after graduate school. In addition to his work as an artist and writer, Seydel was an editor, curator, and teacher who taught for more than a decade at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, and curated more than a dozen exhibitions at various venues. All items on exhibition are on loan from the Estate of Robert Seydel.

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Deena Schnitman will not be going to Guild of Bookworkers Standards this year but will be selling her paper at South End Open Studios, September 20-21. Please visit her in the Group Space at 551 Tremont St.

And, remind her you are a member of GBW and she will be pleased to offer you at 20% discount on any paper bought at the show.